Year 9 Performance Poetry

21 December 2018

We were so pleased to welcome poet, Jay Hulme to work with our Year 9 students for our December Enrichment Day. Jay is a transgender performance poet from Leicester. In 2015 he won SLAMbassadors UK, the UK’s biggest youth poetry slam. At only 21 years of age, he has already published 7 books, with works encompassing both adult and children’s poetry.

Jay started the session with some interactive limerick writing, loosening the students minds to consider that anything, no matter how abstract could work in a poem. Then setting the scene for the students work for the day, he introduced them to a range of contemporary and older poems that tackle the them of conflict, in particular those about war, which links with the work our Year 9’s have already been doing around WWI poetry. The students were encouraged to look for poetic techniques that they could use in their own work. Then before returning to their classes they did some ‘free writing’ to start to get some ideas for their own poems.

Throughout the day, Jay went round to each class to give the students help and critique for their poems. The students surprised us with the quality of their poems, and the breadth of their interpretation of the theme, including family conflict and mental health issues. Lots of the students shared their poems with the group in the afternoon, showing huge amounts of courage, maturity and confidence, other poems were performed by Jay. 
 

Here are 2 of our favourites from the day. 

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